The Grassy Knoll Society

The Kennedy Assassination Launched A Conspiracy Industry That's Still Churning Out Plots 40 Years Later

November 16, 2003|By Jason Krause. Jason Krause is a reporter with the American Bar Association Journal. He lives in Chicago.

Ten years ago, around the 30th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, things seemed to be going pretty well for conspiracy buffs. Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" had come out a few years earlier, re-igniting interest in the event and stoking the dying flames of the conspiracy industry. The movie even helped goad Congress to pass a law declassifying all assassination-related records. Almost every major publication had anniversary stories of some sort, and public opinion surveys indicated that a solid majority of the public did not believe the official theory that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the president.

Next Saturday is the 40th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and hundreds of conspiracy buffs will meet in Dallas to rehash the events of Nov. 22, 1963. They will publish press releases and hold news conferences announcing new bits of information that have come to light. At least one researcher will hold a news conference claiming to have solved the case. But for those who thrive on ever-thickening plots, the 40th anniversary may be the most disappointing yet. Not only have some of the most promising leads fizzled, but bedrock facts that researchers had taken for granted also have been challenged.

The term conspiracy theorist has become synonymous with crackpot or deranged obsessive. The JFK assassination in particular has informed the public perception of such people. When White House spokesman Ari Fleischer wanted to disparage a conspiracy-minded congresswoman, he called her a member of "the Grassy Knoll Society."

But though they are mocked and caricatured, it seems that most of us are conspiracy theorists. A Zogby survey this year found that 56 percent of Americans believed that the president was killed as part of a conspiracy. Only 21 percent believed the government's 1964 Warren Commission Report that Oswald acted alone.

Interest in the assassination has waxed and waned several times over the decades. The first generation of researchers began work soon after the murder, when the Warren Commission volumes came out. The obsessively detailed 1964 report was supposed to have removed any doubt about who shot the president, but the few people who looked through every footnote sometimes found that the details didn't match. Books like Mark Lane's "Rush to Judgment" and Josiah Thompson's "Six Seconds in Dallas" started poking holes in the Warren report.

In the mid-1960s, New Orleans District Atty. Jim Garrison put local businessman Clay Shaw on trial for having some part in the assassination. The trial inspired a second generation of students, even though Garrison's case and reputation quickly fell apart. Then in 1975 Geraldo Rivera got a copy of the Zapruder film, the famous home movie of the killing, and put it on television.

For Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the assassination site, the Warren report made little sense after seeing that film for the first time. "Like a lot of people, I did not believe that shots fired from behind would send the president reeling backwards," he says. Like many others, Mack became a full-time assassination researcher, though few have turned it into a paying career as he has.

What should have been the biggest break came in 1992. The film "JFK" ended with a postscript noting that thousands of government records about the assassination were still classified. In response to the public protest that followed, then-President George H. W. Bush in 1992 signed a measure to declassify every document related to the assassination. From that, no one has found any dramatic revelations among the records.

"The Kennedy assassination is a historical event that has arguably created more documentation than any one event in history," says Jeremy Gunn, executive director of the Assassination Record Review Board who has helped declassify more than 60,000 documents. "I think that fact really brings into question what we can ever hope to know when there is so much evidence and documentation here and still no consensus."

Gunn says at least a dozen times the review board thought it had found a definitive document, but nothing ever panned out. Either it turned out that the title or description of a document was provocative and the document itself was banal, or, upon closer inspection, a seemingly significant line of inquiry turned out to mean something completely different than initially thought.

At one point, Gunn says, the group thought it had found files of a previously unidentified informant on Oswald, but nothing came of the lead. Another time, the board saw some documents that suggested a person had gone on a secret mission to Mexico City for President Lyndon B. Johnson to find out more about the assassination, but the document's author later denied it.